Staying at a hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport in the summer of 2002, I was struck by the sound of the traffic on the A1 motorway; it was loud and persistant, and enhanced by the recent rain storm. About 4am I recorded a series of samples.

Charles at Night uses one of these samples, and is modified with some resonant filters whose frequency and bandwidth are controlled by the Henon equation.

The piece is somewhat loud and liable to give the listener a headache. It however what I wanted.

Licenced under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd).

O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams --- William Shakespeare from Hamlet

This piece explores further all the instruments that were used by Richard Boulanger in his well known Trapped in Convert, and also in his later At Last...Free. The instruments are played in the same order and same proportions as appear in Trapped. However the timing, pitches, and durations and other parameters are chosen by values generated by the Henon (chaotic) equation. This equation

This short piano prelude is an algorithmic composition, the third in the Drums and Different Cannons series, mapping chaotic equations into pitch and time. The first two were tape works, but this is the first designed for a live performer. In this case the equation is the Torus equation x" = K sin(x). To me the interest lies in the similar but non-identical repeating patterns, and sudden changes that form cannons.

This version is realised via Rosegarden, Csound and samples.

Sitting in Detroit Airport (Wright Field) waiting for a flight home from ICMC I found a power point and started an investigation of the 88CET scale. It was a long wait and Wright Field seemed to have no facilities -- food, drink or duty-free shopping.

Prelude; Henon; Gruneberg; Distance; Prelude

The initial idea from which this work spread was a short sequence of notes taken from a mapping of the Henon (chaos) differential equation onto pitch and duration. Certain themes in it suggested to me a piece, which developed into the current manifestation, although it has changed a great deal. The title is an echo of the well known quotation from Thoreau and the repetitive canon like structure of this differential equation. The work is in three movements, the second and third played without a break, with an introductory and closing fanfare.